Las Perras Callejeras

It was easier being street dogs in Puerto Vallarta
than poets, so me and Rosy, we went for it
though in the tortillerias there was still competition
from those putas perras poodles from the hills
on blinged-out leashes lunging at us
for a few sweet-smelling masa crumbs
when we had nothing but metaphors all day, which
jammed the machinery like cockroaches
and were swept out onto the cobblestones
into tidy piles by widows in black,
wrinkled old crows
with cold sores we could hear oozing
like lava,
who worked for beakfuls of tortilla rejects
themselves, and who wouldn’t ingest a literary
device if it was served on a silver platter,
so we wolfed them down in an iamb,
not the widows the metaphors, and sometimes
we stole whole bags tortillas for them
to return the favor, which they stuffed under
their sagging breasts without missing a beat
and then treated us to water in a coffee can lid,
and we’d sing “Somos perras callejeras
pero no poéticas, We are street bitches
but not poetic bitches!” just to hear the rust
red cackle of their laughter and feel their
delightfully acrid pats on our rumps,
the ultimate ass poetica for a canine and
far superior to a standing ovation for a poet.

Holy tamale! Today we gave birth to our 29th, second-to-the-last poem for NaPoWriMo. Silly me, I expected the prompt to be as simple as a haiku. I mean, come on guys, we’re hitting the wall! Well, it turned out to be a doozy! Called “The Twenty Little Poetry Projects,” (and they weren’t kidding, there were 20 components to the poem) it was guaranteed to either give you a massive migraine or poetic pleasure extraordinaire. I fell somewhere in the middle and ended up picking and choosing, hopping all over the place like a Mexican jumping bean. Mostly though, it was a lot of fun.